Sunday, May 23, 2010

Open Boat Cruising

There are other blogs that do a great job covering traditional and open boat sailing.....

DoryMan is my favorite (in my blog list) but two others that also do a good job covering open boat sailing are InTheBoatShed and 70.8% .

The increasing popularity of RAID's (a weeklong event for open and traditional sailboats with each day featuring a point to point race/cruise) and MessAbouts (events based out of one location) are giving open boat cruising new impetus. I would like to do an open boat cruise myself somewhere in the future.

This video is of a Welsford open boat design Navigator (Welsford designs are very comfortable in big wind and waves) sailing from Auckland NZ to the island of Kawau (about 30 km NE).

2 comments:

doryman said...

The Navigator is a great gunkholing boat. I would imagine it would be a workout to row in a RAID, but under sail they can take a lot of weather, as the video shows.
I've recently "met" a new friend from Australia who's building a Navigator. He's a violin maker by trade, so you can imagine how his boats turn out!
Maybe you've seen this already but if not...

http://middlething.blogspot.com/

doryman (thanks for the plug!)

George A said...

I guess you heard that the ultimate day boat adventurer, Frank Dye, passed away recently. He sailed a Wayfarer from the UK to Iceland among other jaunts.